My Kitchen Wars

by Betty Fussell

  We were living in a house with the lovely name of Villa les Marguerites in the midst of a walled garden on the Chemin des Pins. Our landlady and her husband lived in an ordinary house directly below us on the steep hillside, and despite their unconditional contempt for Americans, they rented to us on condition that we pay the year’s rent in advance—in cash. We called them Les Fascistes because they attributed all their ills to the death of Maréchal Pétain. Monsieur was openly hostile and paranoid, and when we were away, he sneaked into the villa to check up on us, which we discovered when he accidentally broke off his key in the front lock. Later he charged us for the pane of glass he’d broken in order to open the door.

  It was Madame who hired for us our first cook, Madame La Fou, as we called her in our ignorance, not knowing it should be La Folle. It was unthinkable to Madame the Landlady that anyone could live in a villa with such splendid public rooms—walls of turquoise brocaded silk, gilded furniture of Louis Seize, rugs of oriental weave, toilet seats of Delft porcelain—and not have a servant to cook and clean. She was protecting her investment, and besides, it would take a native servant to know how to cook in a narrow corridor of a kitchen with no equipment, in a house heated by an ancient coal furnace in a basement that could only be entered through an outside door on the street. Madame La Fou presented herself as a cook from the North, exact location unspecified, who had presided for twenty years over the grand table of a monsignor. Madame the Landlady accepted her on the spot. All we had to do was pay for her.

  Because she was from the North, she had no place to live, and she demanded that we set up a cot for her in the basement. In America we’d had plenty of cleaning ladies but never a live-in anybody. Paul hated the idea of a stranger hanging about, but there was no help for it. Next she demanded that we buy her a batterie de cuisine. Impossible to cook without the items she’d listed, on several sheets, in a meticulous hand. I went to Madame the Landlady with concern because the list was so long and I didn’t have Julia with me to tell me what things were. I could look up chinois and tamis de crin in a dictionary and find out that they were sieves, and I could translate their names literally, “Chinese cap” and “horsehair drum sieve,” but what did that mean? It seemed there were sieves and sieves. The sieve shaped like an inverted Chinese coolie hat had a cone of very fine mesh or perforated metal or even felt, attached to a metal rim, and was used for straining the seeds from a fruit puree or egg whites from clarified consommé. The drum held a mesh of tightly woven horsehair between a pair of circular wooden frames, through which you pushed ingredients with a mushroom-shaped wooden pestle, aptly called a champignon, to create a smooth paste, puree, or sauce. Were these esoteric instruments really necessary?

  To my surprise, Madame the Landlady said oui, and agreed to pay. It wasn’t that she suffered a sudden fit of generosity, but rather that she had a Frenchwoman’s overriding sense of the dignité propre à la cuisine. The kitchen itself had no dignity at all. It was a squalid greenroom for the furious Comédie-Française performed at the dining table by Madame La Fou each noon. And what a performance.

  For two to three hours, while all of Nice and Cimiez and the adjoining villages up and down the Corniche retired to their houses to eat the big meal and sleep, we sweated to keep up with the onslaught of dishes served course after course by Madame La Fou. Now that she was properly equipped, she could make a silken pâté out of any sow’s ear, tail, or hoof. She worked herself into a lather with her tamis and chinois, her braisière and bain-marie, her moule à douille and her pots de crème. Her cheeks fiery, hair tight in a bun, she mumbled and sighed as she presented each dish, then hovered over us as we took the first bite of an angelic coquilles Saint-Jacques au vin blanc or a seraphic potage à l’oseille, waiting for the praise we lavished upon her in vain. She knew her food was incomparable and we were unworthy of it. We were not French. Not French from the North. Her contempt for the French of Provence was as intense as Madame the Landlady’s for the Americans of Nouvelle-Jersey.

  Our children were also required to eat a two-hour meal, but at school. If they did not clean their plates, they were rapped by knuckles on the back of their heads and kept at table until they finished. This may be why my daughter will eat almost anything set before her and my son almost nothing, unless he has chosen it himself. After the noon dinner, they played unsupervised in the schoolyard, where the Americans (only my two) and the pieds-noirs (of which there were many) were pitted against the French in an ongoing battle fought with palm staves, while the teachers enjoyed their meal at leisure.

  The dark side of the French obsession with food became evident when Madame La Fou began to grumble about her basement quarters. She’d insisted that all she wanted was a cot, but now she wanted to move upstairs into the guest room. She also began to exhibit signs of our landlord’s paranoia. “They” were after her, she explained, with sweat beading her upper lip. We knew she had left behind a husband and children, as well as the monsignor, but she declined to say why, except to imply that something terrible had happened. Poison, I speculated, having just read Mauriac’s Thérèse Desqueyroux, set in the North. I didn’t want to get on her bad side, but I knew I wouldn’t sleep a wink with her in the room next to us. I’d become truly afraid of her. After a particularly sullen lunch, I consulted Madame the Landlady. “Parbleu, I fired her this morning,” she said in a rush. “She came to me with the most extraordinary demands! The woman’s demented—I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she was wanted by the police—so I gave her twenty-four hours to pack and get out.”

  I told the children to lock their bedroom door in case Madame La Fou attempted to sleep upstairs on this, her last night, and entered their room by mistake. We locked our bedroom door and that of the guest room, which we could enter via an adjoining balcony. She could climb up to either balcony by means of the wisteria vines that arbored the terrace, but she had considerable poundage to haul, so we felt relatively safe. We heard nothing during the night and the next morning she was gone, without a sound, without a trace, leaving behind a dignified batterie de cuisine and a faint sulphurous whiff of madness.

  The next cook we hired ourselves, making sure she didn’t want to live in. Madou had been working since she was twelve in the hotels and restaurants of her native Médoc. She was in her forties and came no higher than my waist, but she could do anything. She could stoke a furnace, fix a faucet, light the oven without explosion, sing lullabies to the children, and puree through the tamis a soupe de poisson equal to any in Marseilles. And she liked Americans. They were nicer to her than the French were.

  She insisted that I check all grocery accounts item by item and, once she understood that I trusted her entirely, allowed me to accompany her on her shopping rounds. In her little green coat she buzzed like a fly through the produce of one corner market after another, through the local poissonnerie, boucherie, boulangerie, charcuterie, pâtisserie, alighting here and there to greet, poke, sniff, sample, palpate, negotiate, laugh, and commiserate before moving on. Each purchase was a litany intoned at breakneck speed because it was as fixed as curtain time, five days a week. “Bonjour, mesdames,” sang the mussel seller and her husband, holding up a string bag of silvery black shells freshly washed in a mussel-cleaning machine. “Bonjour, madame, bonjour, monsieur,” sang Madou in response. “Comment ça va? Tout va bien? Ils sont tous frais? A quel prix ce matin? Ah, quel horreur.” The quick flutter of fingers over the shells, the quick counting of coins and bills, the ceremonial departure. “Au revoir, mesdames, merci bien.” “Au revoir, madame, au revoir, monsieur, à bientôt.” And then on to the carrot lady, the lettuce man, the cheese and milk couple, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. I was mesmerized by the ritual.

  Once back at the villa we deposited our string bags, lumpy with purchases, in the kitchen. Then I was banished to the parlor because I got in the way as Madou whirled around the narrow space like the blade of a Cuisinart, turning all this provender into the day’s salads, sauces,
soups, roasts, filets, omelettes, side dishes, and desserts, in a dreamscape where the baguette was always crisp and the butter ever sweet. Unless it rained, and it seldom did, we ate on the terrace underneath the wisteria, so my memory is tinged violet and perfumed by the roses and hollyhocks and little yellow marguerites of the garden. After lunch, we staggered upstairs for siesta, that most luxurious and un-American of rituals. We closed the tall wooden shutters over the French windows, but there was still soft light and plenty of time to read and lazily make love and even sleep.

  Nothing in Nice or Cimiez reopened until four in the afternoon, when we woke to the drone of motorbikes and motor scooters swarming through the narrow streets. Madou had gone, leaving the kitchen and the rest of the house immaculate. She had set the dining table for tea, which I served after I fetched the kids home from school at five o’clock. She had put out bread and soup in the kitchen for supper at eight. The soup was invariably a puree of leftover vegetables and meat juices, put through the tamis and enriched with a large pat of butter. The soup was as soothing as our daily routine, which, because it was almost as regimented as life aboard ship, seemed to stretch time instead of frazzle it. It was a good way to live.

  With a real cook in the kitchen, I had time to pursue a different kind of kitchen work. Every morning after shopping I walked down to the Nice Public Library and dived into the ocean of French gastronomic literature. In France food not only had a history but a literature: Ali-Bab, Curnonsky, Dumas, Grimod de la Reynière, and of course Escoffier. Escoffler had been born in a village just down the road from Nice, at Villeneuve-Loubet, and his house there was being restored as a museum.

  I interviewed the curator, eighty-year-old André Layet, a native of Villeneuve who had worked under Escoffier at the Hotel Métropole in Monte Carlo before following him to London. All the paintings in the museum had been done by chefs, including one by Layet called Dream of the Old Chef. Many chefs were painters, he said. Chefs were good with their hands.

  To interview any chef, retired or otherwise, was to experience a living tradition of art that was entirely about food. Everyone I talked to seemed to share this tradition, and it blew my mind. Monsieur Verdoja, proprietor of our favorite local bistro, L’Estragon, where we dined as a family every Sunday night on sole meunière on the bone, “good value for under 12 Francs.” M. Augereau of L’Auberge Jeanne de Laval at Les Rosiers-sur-Loire, whose meals were so perfect that we stayed a week in order to eat them twice a day. M. Claude at L’Auberge d’Hostellerie des Santons in Grimaud, who had just won his first star. The venerable M. Tuillerie at L’Oustau de Baumanière in Les Baux, who had won his three stars decades ago. The modern revolution of celebrity chefs was in its infancy, and chefs were happy to sit down and share a glass of champagne and a half hour of chat with an eager American questioner.

  By now, Paul and I had eaten the Perfect Chicken not only at the inn of La Mère Brazier, but at the restaurant of La Mere Blanc in Vonnas-sur-Veyle. One weekend, with the children safe in their beds at Cimiez, we set off in the yellow Beetle to track it to its source in the area of Bresse, birthplace of Brillat-Savarin, northeast of Lyons. It was beautiful countryside, with tile-roofed farms scattered across the sunbaked earth like grains of maize, and everywhere the hum of bees. We had to ask directions many times of blue-smocked farmers on horse-drawn carts, but at last we found the farm of Monsieur Cyrille Poncet, president of the Club des Lauréats of Saint-Etienne-du-Bois. It was a rustic slab of a house with great bunches of maize hanging from the eaves. The door was open and in the dark inside sat an old man and an old woman, each in a black felt hat, eating silently from a bowl.

  Poncet spoke in a country dialect, but I taped him so that I could translate his words slowly at home. His grandfather had competed in the first concours of the birds at Bourg-en-Bresse in 1862, honoring Napoleon III. His father had won the prix d’honneur six times, for a breed that had been known since the sixteenth century and had been granted a government appellation since 1936. “Beauté et qualité” was the motto of the prize-winning Lauréats. “To keep the purity of the breed” was the passion of the Poncets. He described how his wife caponized the birds the way the Romans had and lovingly force-fed them a paste of corn and milk in their Death Row days. He showed us how he prepared them for exhibit by pushing in legs and wings to make a smooth white blimp of the body and to show off the blue legs, wattles, and combs. “Demand the Standard,” Bresse producers urged, “the Bird with the Steel-Blue Legs.”

  These were not the chickens of my forefathers, these birds with breasts thick, tender, and juicy—“succulent as a woman’s,” as Paul Bocuse had said—but I was struck nonetheless by the rod of conversion. At last I had something to write about that was not just literature but life, that was not just for today but that bore a history as old as ancient Rome, that was not just intellectual or sensual or artistic but was all of these rolled up together, something that was remarkably like love. Who but the French would make a chicken a love object, would caress it with the passion of a lover for his beloved or a communicant for his God, would turn it into a work of art that, no matter how crowned with laurel, must be eaten to be experienced? “Like the wines of Burgundy, it is on the palate that one appreciates them,” said M. Poncet of his birds. “The rest is words in the air.” What a revelation! I took up my primitive tape recorder and my portable typewriter and began to put words on paper.

  Every chef attributed his art to the quality of what he brought into his kitchen from local purveyors. So I sought out André Pio on his small vegetable farm at the mouth of the Loup, les Frères Guigues at their butcher shop in Old Town, Pierre Armand at his fish shop in Place François, and Hans Brobecker at his bakery on rue Marceau. They all sang the song I’d heard from Poncet when he extolled the beauty of his chickens and the honor of his métier. Each had a calling that gave meaning to his life. I heard echoes of Isaiah’s “Here am I; send me.” It was a love song, a chanson d’amour, that fed their souls.

  By the time we’d undergone initiation into the ancien régime of Lasserre in Paris (to eat truffe sur la cendre) and La Pyramide in Vienne (to eat fois gras en brioche), we felt ready for the Young Turks of Nouvelle Cuisine. Paul and I took a weekend trip to Lyons to sample the work of a promising young chef I wanted to interview because he’d just won his third Michelin star, Paul Bocuse. With his own Perfect Chicken and his saumon en croûte, Bocuse did not disappoint, nor did he intimidate. He not only liked Americans, he liked America. He invited me to spend a week cooking in his kitchen, but I had to get back to the kids, so he invited us into his playroom downstairs, where he’d constructed a Western movie saloon with player pianos and shotguns and ten-gallon hats. While we were playing at being French, he was playing Cowboys and Indians.

  When we got back to Nice, Madou was in a tizzy. A thief had hit seven villas in a row the night before, making headlines for the Nice-Matin as “le Voleur des Villas.” He was a skilled second-story man who had left his ladder in our garden as evidence that he had tiptoed past the children’s bedroom upstairs, where Madou was also sleeping, to ransack Paul’s study downstairs in the vain hope of jewels and cash. He had better luck in our landlords’ house, where he’d made off with a sackful of jewelry but couldn’t get at their cash, locked in the cupboard of the room where they were eating. He’d buried his loot in the garden of the seventh villa just before they caught him and put him in the very jail where Madou’s boyfriend was a cop. All the cops and crooks of Nice knew each other because they were all from Corsica. Unfortunately, the salary we paid Madou went straight into the pockets of her cop, a compulsive gambler who spent all his time outside the jail inside the casino.

  Madou it was who saved me during my crise de foie. “Ma foi, mon foie,” we used to joke, because Madou ascribed every ailment from a sick headache to an aching back to the liver. But it was true that ma foi, in the medieval Christian sense of fidelity, was in poor shape. I was still corresponding, fitfully and guiltily, with Dave. I receiv
ed his letters at the Hotel Vendôme on rue Pastorelli, heart pounding, certain the desk clerk knew I was having an affair—he was French after all—and certain that each letter, like each cigarette in my smoking days, would be my last before I quit for good. So when I was knocked out by lobster poisoning, a bad liver seemed an appropriate punishment for bad faith.

  Once again the trigger was a lobster—not a true homard, but the common European crayfish, langouste. A langouste niçoise, in fact, which according to a famous Niçois gastronome was the true origin of the dish mislabeled homard à l’américaine. The langouste in question was the orgasmic climax of a long-awaited meal in our favorite of all restaurants, Chez Puget. Here the ritual was liturgic: the burgundy drapes on the windows, the mauve walls, the pink linen on the tables, the black silk bosom of Madame Puget on the cashier’s counter, the white toque of Monsieur Puget in the kitchen. Chez Puget was consecrated to the proposition that all virtue, art, and glory are expressed in France’s classic bourgeois cuisine.

  Here we learned the alphabet sacré of aïoli, brandade, and cassoulet. We learned that vegetables were always served on separate little dishes. We learned that the secret of what we called “the caramel sauce” was foie gras stirred into a glace de viande. I’d interviewed M. Puget near the end of our stay and he’d promised to create a menu especially for us. Because of subsequent events, I’ve blocked everything but the glorious langouste, served in the two halves of its shell, the flesh wet with oil and garlic, cognac and tomato, a Mediterranean melody in every bite. We fell all over ourselves, in a dignified French way of course, expressing gratitude to Monsieur and Madame and to their children and to the descending row of kitchen help, before bidding adieu. By the time we reached our car, my belly was tied in a Gordian knot.